How to capture and combine audio/video output from 4 PCs?

Some friends and I are thinking about playing through the old Doom games in 4-player cooperative mode and uploading it to YouTube. It'll be four PCs running vanilla Doom through DOSBox over a LAN.

Is there an easy software-only solution to capture and combine the four sessions into a single splitscreen video file, as well as include any microphones? It looks like I could manage this with FFMPEG but all my searching has turned up is indecipherable poorly-explained command-line voodoo.

I could just run four instances of fraps and edit the videos together, but I'm not sure if everything will stay synced up through the duration.

Some friends and I are thinking about playing through the old Doom games in 4-player cooperative mode and uploading it to YouTube. It'll be four PCs running vanilla Doom through DOSBox over a LAN.

Is there an easy software-only solution to capture and combine the four sessions into a single splitscreen video file, as well as include any microphones? It looks like I could manage this with FFMPEG but all my searching has turned up is indecipherable poorly-explained command-line voodoo.

I could just run four instances of fraps and edit the videos together, but I'm not sure if everything will stay synced up through the duration.

Do you have access to Premiere? Synch up the videos and do a Multi-Camera thing.

capture and combine the four sessions into a single splitscreen video file, as well as include any microphones

My advice: DON'T.

Capture the game videos and microphone audio separately so you can mix it later. If you find out after recording an hour of video that one person's microphone was too loud or too quiet or that someone's game audio was too loud, there's no way to fix it if your raw video has all that combined into one stream.

Here's what you should do to make the synchronizing easier for yourself:

Some friends and I are thinking about playing through the old Doom games in 4-player cooperative mode and uploading it to YouTube. It'll be four PCs running vanilla Doom through DOSBox over a LAN.

Is there an easy software-only solution to capture and combine the four sessions into a single splitscreen video file, as well as include any microphones? It looks like I could manage this with FFMPEG but all my searching has turned up is indecipherable poorly-explained command-line voodoo.

I could just run four instances of fraps and edit the videos together, but I'm not sure if everything will stay synced up through the duration.

For capture: OBS is pretty easy to set up. It also lets you put the microphone on a separate channel IIRC.

Once you've done that,you can splice them together using your favorite video editor (technically it's possible to do this in OBS as well, but a lot trickier).